Turning Kim Kardashian & her derriere into a marketing principle

Kim Kardashian, her overexposed rear and brand of “Sell-ebrity” are the subjects of a new marketing bookDelshad Irani | ETBrandEquity | May 10, 2017, 07:19 IST

Could Jeetendr Sehdev be Kim Kardashian’s greatest advocate? Yes. If the Indian-origin Brit, mentee of Sir Martin Sorrell, and “world’s foremost authority on celebrities’” book The Kim Kardashian Principle: Why Shameless Sells (and How To Do It Right) is anything to go by. In the book he makes a fairly compelling case for brands to take inspiration from the Kardashian school of marketing. After all, she’s built a global business and power brand, all on the solid foundation of a “leaked” sex tape and ample assets.

Love her or hate her, you can’t argue that Kardashian doesn’t have an irrational sway over people, young and old. Although just recently she lost one fan on the wrong side of Millennial: Piers Morgan, who, for a while, “enjoyed the Kardashian ride”. In fact Morgan even defended the Kardashians before his sudden change of heart. He said, “Their overly pious critics seemed to miss the point - which was that there wasn’t really any point to them. They were just having fun. As a result, I’d defend them vigorously against those who said they represented everything repellent about the fickle, artless world of Z-list reality television.”

But, now, Morgan’s “Done. Done. DONE.” He wrote in a recently published piece, “I’m done with Kim Kardashian. And her ghastly family… I just can’t stomach the sight or thought of any of these talentless, publicity-crazed, unctuously self-absorbed, vacuous wastrels for a single moment longer.”

What brought on Morgan’s melodramatic reversal? The list of transgressions is long. But here’s a sampling. Kim married “bad boy” rapper Kanye West, posts nude selfies while flipping the bird (a stand for feminism and women empowerment in her book), sells merchandise promoting the “joy of drugs” and a recent sob-fest with “the world’s chief celebrity sycophant” Ellen DeGeneres cemented Morgan’s revised opinion of KK and clan.

“When you have literally tens of millions of young female followers hanging on your every social media post, you surely have a great duty of care to send them the right messages?” Morgan’s done with this “absurd, disingenuous horses**t!”

But Sehdev clearly can’t get enough. Instead he has turned Kim and her derriere into a marketing principle: the KKP or Kim Kardashian Principle.